In
the past I have tended to berate this record because I have felt that
it was made too quickly on a tight budget, but I have now got to like
it from a distance. There was some rumour put around a little while
ago that I wasn't very pleased with what Shel Talmy (the producer)
had done with it. This is certainly not what I would have wanted Shel
to believe.

At face value he did a good
job with material that is not that easy, and I now look back on the
sessions with a certain affection. Besides, making enemies out of
friends should be left to the music media, where it belongs.

There are enough relevant statements
on board for me to really love it in another twenty years.

- Roy Harper

On
Harper's second album (and first for a major label), he strode further
into folk-rock as opposed to folk, with sympathetic production from
Shel Talmy; there was light electric backing and drums, as well as
occasional orchestration. Harper remained, however, overly verbose,
his observational lyrics tending to jam too many thoughts into too
little time. Often this is stream-of-consciousness song writing, proving
that such a strain existed in alternative rock long before Jandek
and Lambchop's Kurt Wagner. Harper is far more tuneful, and a much
better singer and instrumentalist, than either Jandek or Wagner, which
makes this much more accessible on a surface level. Still, it's music
that demands a lot of concentration to apprehend, and ultimately doesn't
fully reward the effort, the listener's attention tending to drift
off amidst Harper's inscrutability. Far be it from a mere critic to
suggest such a thing decades after the fact, but it may have been
that Harper could have well done with a song writing collaborator
who could have extracted Roy's most coherent ideas, and sanded off
the most incoherent ones. Especially befuddling are the epic-length
cuts ("Circle" and the title track), which seem to wish
to be making a grand point, but are only intermittently interesting
winding roads, the pseudo-humorous spoken dialogue in "Circle"
falling especially flat. He is best when he is most restrained, as
on "All You Need Is" and "What You Have." The
CD reissue on Science Friction adds seven bonus tracks. Two are from
his 1969 album Folkjokeopus; two are from a 1967 single that is only
marginally more commercial than the album; and the remaining three
are from 1969-70 BBC sessions.